Elizabeth Zoe Lindsay Drink Fanta

A Consciousness of the Luxury of Art: An Interview with Jon Leon

Last month I received a copy of the first issue of a new project by publisher James Copeland called Content, a series that releases uniform length and shape books each filled with “content” from an individual author without restriction. The first issue is by Jon Leon, a piece titled Elizabeth ZoĆ« Lindsay Drink Fanta, which is at its most basic a series of photographs of the three famous women referred to in the title, manipulated and arranged by Leon throughout.

I didn’t quite know what to make of the book at first. I think I immediately thought, Why? But the book stayed out on my desk and I found myself continuing to look at it, and to think about the things Leon mentioned in the one page letter that accompanied the volume (reproduced here on Leon’s website), which includes the lines, “I wanted to talk about ‘the demented power of the lights,’ how literature is evil, the end of my ‘career,’ the end of the artists editions, my conceptual death, my simulation of life, my meltdown in print and on tape, my public facade, my disappearance from Los Angeles, my disappearance from the Atlanta scene, my disappearance from New York in the holiday of 2009. My resolution to ‘end this shit’ in 2010. To kill off the poems.”

Last week I had an email correspondence with Mr. Leon regarding the concept of the book, its assemblage, the context of creation and aging with creation, Lindsay Lohan, modeling, and disintegration in general, among other things.

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August 29th, 2011 / 12:59 pm